Hybrid working

Hybrid Working

A Dictionary of Behavioral Biases

A project by BE-Inclusive; an LSE group focused on using behavioural science to promote inclusion in the workplace: Catherine Bouckley, Michaela Fricova, Sammy Glatzel, Natalie Hall, Ipsitaa Khullar, Alexandra Kirienko, Sharon Raj, Tina Soh, and Sego Zeller.

Additional authors from The Inclusion Initiative at LSE: Teresa Almeida, Paris Will,
and Dr Grace Lordan.

I hope it inspires some readers to monitor the issues that we raise so that hybrid working does not have winners and losers, but rather makes possible the equalisation of opportunities.

Dr Grace Lordan

The world of work is changing. Once the COVID-19 pandemic ends it is expected that work will return to a “new” normal.This “new” normal is expected to leverage some of the positive changes to work that were enlisted to allow workers to continue to work safely during the pandemic. For professional workers, one such change is a move towards hybrid working. Here, within firms some workers will work on site and others will work from home. For some firms this will mean sequential attendance of employees on-site. For others it will be decided who works on-site fulltime depending on their job. Either way, a move towards hybrid working, where some employees communicate face to face and others online poses challenges for inclusivity. Specific to inclusion, there is a dearth of literature in behavioral science, or indeed in the broader social sciences that provides robust evidence of problems to inclusivity that will arise in a hybrid work setting. 

Yet we are only beginning to think about behavioral responses to hybrid working, and to date there has been no discussion as to what behavioral biases are most likely to impact hybrid working. In Hybrid Working: A Dictionary of Behavioral Biases you will find a description of behavioral biases, and an example of how they may arise in hybrid working, as conceived by BE-Inclusive, a talented group of MSc Behavioural Science students at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Read the report here